Compare methods

	Strategic Scenario Planning	Cross-Impact Analysis
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	1968
Originator	Pierre Wack; Paul Schoemaker; Kees van der Heijden	Theodore Gordon & H. Hayward; Olaf Helmer
Type	Structured foresight process for strategy under deep uncertainty	Conditional-probability simulation of interacting future events
Seminal source	Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40.	Gordon, T. J., & Hayward, H. (1968). Initial experiments with the cross impact matrix method of forecasting. Futures, 1(2), 100-116.
Aliases	Intuitive-Logics Scenario Method, Scenario-Based Strategic Planning, Strategic Foresight Scenarios, Shell-Style Scenario Planning	Cross-Impact Matrix Method, Cross-Impact Forecasting, Conditional-Probability Futures Analysis, Event Interaction Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Strategic scenario planning is a structured foresight method that helps organizations make decisions under deep uncertainty by constructing a small set of internally consistent, sharply divergent stories about how the future could unfold. The dominant 'intuitive-logics' tradition was pioneered at Royal Dutch/Shell by Pierre Wack, whose 1985 Harvard Business Review account showed how scenarios prepared Shell's managers for the 1973 oil shock by changing how they perceived their world rather than by predicting it. Paul Schoemaker's 1995 Sloan Management Review article codified the approach into a repeatable step-by-step process for managers, and Kees van der Heijden's 1996 book reframed scenarios as the centerpiece of an ongoing 'strategic conversation' through which an organization builds shared understanding and adaptive capacity. The aim is not to forecast a single future but to make strategy robust across several plausible ones.	Cross-impact analysis is a forecasting technique that models how a set of possible future events influence one another, so that forecasts account for the fact that real events are interdependent rather than isolated. Theodore Gordon and H. Hayward introduced the cross-impact matrix method in their 1968 Futures paper, motivated by the observation that judgmental forecasts such as Delphi estimate the likelihood of each event separately and ignore that the occurrence of one event can sharply raise or lower the odds of others. Olaf Helmer's 1977 work refined the approach, distinguishing the original correlational formulation from a causal cross-impact model and addressing the internal-consistency problems that plagued early matrices. The method specifies prior probabilities for events and conditional 'cross-impact' probabilities between them, then simulates the system to produce internally consistent joint outcomes and revised probabilities.